March 22, 2014

Three Videos: Ryan Dawson - Iraq 11 years after the 2nd invasion + 2014 National Summit - Reassessing US Israel special relationship + John Mearsheimer on America Unhinged

"Nevertheless, The Israel Lobby contains a fundamental analytic
truth that is undeniable: the US and Israel, like most states, have
some different interests that inevitably push up against any enduring
special relationship, especially because their security situations are
so vastly different. To start with, the US is a
continent-size country protected by oceans, while Israel is a small
country half a world away, surrounded by enemy states. Because
the geographical situations of the US and Israel are so dissimilar,
their geopolitical interests can never completely overlap in the way
that Israel’s most fervent supporters contend. (Iran’s nuclear program
is a far more acute threat to Israel than it is to the US.) “The fact
that Israel is a democracy is important,” Mearsheimer tells me. “But it
is not sufficient to justify the terms of the special relationship. We
should treat Israel as a normal country, like we treat Britain or
Japan.”

What particularly exasperates Mearsheimer and Walt is the lack of
conditionality in the special relationship. They admit that making
American support for Israel “more conditional would not remove all
sources of friction” between Arab countries and the US; nor do they deny
“the presence of genuine anti-Semitism in various Arab countries”. But
they cannot condone a situation in which the US has, over the decades,
given Israel more than $US180 billion in economic and military
assistance, “the bulk of it comprising direct grants rather than loans”,
and yet can barely achieve modest negotiating goals such as getting
Israel to stop expanding West Bank settlements for 90 days, let alone
dismantle them, even though the Palestinians have been willing at times
to make major concessions. (And the US has been willing to throw in
major sweeteners in the form of advanced military hardware.) Mearsheimer
and Walt repeatedly say in their book that they believe the US should
militarily defend Israel if it is in mortal danger, but that the
Israelis must be much more cooperative in light of all the aid they get.
But, as they also argue, the reason the Israelis are not more
co-operative is that in the final analysis, they don’t have to be –
which, in turn, is because of the pro-Israel lobby. Thus, in the spirit
of Huntington, the authors distil a complicated situation down to a
single, powerful cause. I see nothing wrong or illegitimate about this
core argument. And no amount of nitpicking by their critics of The Israel Lobby’s 100 pages of endnotes can detract from it.
I say this as someone who is a veteran of the Israel Defence Forces and
who supported the Iraq War (a position I have come to deeply regret).
Say what you will about The Israel Lobby, but as Justine Rosenthal – who is a former editor of The National Interest, a leading foreign-policy journal, and is now with Newsweek – told me, “It changed the debate on Israel, even if it did not change the policy”." - Robert D Kaplan, Financial Review, February 2012.

"One speaker put it this way: "The 'Special Relationship' isn't working!
We want it instead to be a "normal" relationship between the U.S. and
Israel. We believe that will serve better the "national interests of
both countries."

Video Title: John Mearsheimer on America Unhinged. Source: Center for the National Interest. Date Published: January 28, 2014.